“He went to Paris, looking for answers, to questions that bothered him so.” ~ “He Went to Paris”, Jimmy Buffet A few years ago my sister was unable to get email or easy phone access and so we wrote letters to each other — most often weekly. In a letter, you have time to tell […]
Category Archives: happiness
“Stop, I’ve gotta go,” Sammy directed, and I pulled off the dirt track next to a deep arroyo. My Navajo assistant liked to pee off of high places, and I joined him at the edge. Off in the distance, across the sage-covered desert, a pair of small mesas shimmered in the summer heat. It wasn’t […]
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” ~ Margaret Attwood My father’s garden was a small area about ten-foot by ten against the south side of the house that got intense sun early in the day, but was shaded in the afternoon. He didn’t start a garden until […]
Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a word for such mark-making: ‘foil’. A creature’s ‘foil’ is its track. The path’s sediment comprised sentiment, and to follow a path might therefore […]
Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking … That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. ~ Justin Davidson Our hotel was in one of the […]
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~ Arthur Ashe A few years ago I became intrigued by the concept of ‘carbon footprint’, the sum of all the greenhouse gases — like carbon dioxide — emitted by someone’s actions. Early on, the size of your footprint was represented by the […]
“…the tactile details of a landscape that often pass unnoticed. They are durably imprinted memories, these footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land….Walking barefoot, you are freshly sensitive to the nap of the landscape. The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane I remember running out of […]
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. ~ Hamlet by William Shakespeare Removing the leaves and mess on top, I reached the gooey black layer. A millipede raced away from the light and red worms squirmed to bury themselves again. The compost was ripe and ready to be harvested. I’m a lazy gardener (although […]
There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark […]
“..the comfortable walk has to do with the fact that all animals seek, simultaneously, prospect and refuge. We want to be able to see our predators, but we also want to feel that our flanks are covered. And so we’re drawn to places that have good edges, and if you don’t supply the edges, people […]
Writes of Nature 